BR549 "Dog Days" Dualtone THE AVETT BROTHERS "Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions" Ramseur

BR549"Dog Days"DualtoneTHE AVETT BROTHERS"Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions"Ramseur

BR549 GOT ITS start 11 years ago in the then-seedy neighborhood around Ryman Auditorium. Since then, however, the area has transformed itself into the Nashville equivalent of Georgetown, a change lamented in "Lower Broad Street Blues" on the new BR549 album, "Dog Days." Co-written by bandleader Chuck Mead and Guy Clark, the song describes how the scene's drunks and songwriters have been replaced by grinning tourists who want to "be your buckaroo." It's a subject that Mead might have played for laughs once, but now he sings it with an understated regret reinforced by the long fiddle lines of Donnie Herron.

BR549, like its old stomping grounds, has changed as well, losing two of its five founders at the end of 2001 and their two replacements at the end of 2004. The result is a leaner, subtler quartet featuring three of the band's founders--Mead, multi-instrument whiz Herron (who moonlights with Bob Dylan's band) and drummer Shadow Wilson -- and new bassist Mark Miller. Many of the songs resemble Buddy Miller's R&B-flavored take on honky-tonk; Mead isn't that good, but he comes close enough to make BR549 matter again.

Because they employ banjo, acoustic guitar and upright bass, the Avett Brothers are sometimes described as a bluegrass band, but the North Carolina trio is a bluegrass act only in the sense that the Violent Femmes or Sufjan Stevens are. In other words, the rhythms are punchier, the picking less dazzling, the vocals more ragged and the songwriting stranger than anything you find at your average bluegrass festival. The songwriting is the key, and it's the striking lyric images, quirky stories and catchy melodies that make "Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions" the best Avett Brothers album yet.

The 17 songs were recorded in two weeks in a house by a mountain lake with minimalist arrangements that shove the vocals to the foreground. As printed in the CD booklet, the lyrics are full of ellipses because the songs tend to jump from one epiphany to another. In "Left on Laura Left on Lisa," for example, the singer and his girlfriend sit on a rooftop watching the sunrise and pledging love; then suddenly they're breaking up, and the singer is describing how they met, wedging a beer bottle into a magnolia tree. It's as if the beginning, middle and end of the story were happening at once. Memory is like that, and so are most of the songs on this album.

-- Geoffrey Himes

Appearing Sunday at the Rams Head Tavern and Jan. 24 at the Birchmere.